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Consumer Electronic Companies Get Rid of Wires with WirelessHD.

Category: Multimedia

by Anton Shilov

[ 10/31/2006 | 12:58 PM ]

A consortium of leading makers of consumer electronics (CE) announced Tuesday formation of a special interest group that will develop specification of wireless interface – WirelessHD or WiHD – intended to enable high-definition audio video (A/V) streaming and high-speed content transmission for CE devices.

WirelessHD, which intends to specify the unlicensed, globally available 60GHz frequency band, will enable wireless high-definition, high-quality video and data transmission and is first targeted to be built into HDTV’s as well as a wide range of audio video (A/V) devices, both fixed location and portable.

By creating WiHD, the consortium ensures that consumer electronics devices from its members will operate seamlessly and will enable not only wireless current-generation products that includes such leading edge technologies as TV-sets with 1080p resolution, Blu-ray/HD DVD players and so on, but will also be used for many years to come being supported by devices featuring future-generation formats. The goals that the special interest group plans to achieve include multi-gigabit transfer rates; secure communications; error protection, framing and timing control techniques for seamless operation and so on.

The special interest group includes such companies as LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), NEC Corp., Samsung Electronics, SiBeam, Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp.

WirelessHD group will present the format available for adoption as soon as the specifications are completed, in Spring 2007. Other makers of consumer electronics are also welcome into the consortium.

“Emerging as the first consumer electronics industry initiative for wireless uncompressed digital video transmission, WirelessHD will provide consumers wireless flexibility and ease of use while preserving the benefits traditionally associated with popular wired alternatives for point-to-point display, such as HDMI and DVI,” said Brian O’Rourke, a Senior Analyst with In-Stat/MDR. “The data rates (or bandwidth) that WirelessHD will support are truly impressive.”